Month: March 2010

So, a few weeks ago the Zombie Ranch theme song popped into my skull. A theme song for a webcomic? Preposterous, you say! And yet, this webcomic is in part about a TV show, and TV shows have theme songs. What could be better than some country-twanged gentleman regaling the Safe Zone audiences about the romance and danger of the occupation they’re about to witness?

Now I can (allegedly) write, and even do a bit of singing, but I sure can’t play guitar much. Fortunately, I happen to have friends who can sing, play, and have access to a recording studio. So after confirming they’d be interested in bringing the song to life (unlife?), I typed up the lyrics and made a recording of me warbling out a preliminary melody, and sent them off with a few “mood” guidelines.

You can tell when your partners are excited about a project, because they got this done in just a couple of weeks, and what they came up with is fantastic. I expected maybe one of them strumming a guitar and singing, and instead got a recording worthy of Nashville. You better believe I’m going to permalink it somewhere on the site, as soon as we figure out where to put it. For now, we’ve linked it as this week’s “comic”, so go there and have a listen if you haven’t already!

Zombie Ranch Theme Song

By the by, Seth and Justin have a band called Southern Oracle that tours the Los Angeles area. If you’re interested, join up on their Facebook page and find out when you can catch a concert! Southern Oracle isn’t really a Country-Western group, but that just goes to show how talented they are at exploring all sorts of music. They love what they do, and it shows.

Turns out our break was well-timed, since Dawn ended up with a mild bout of RSI in her drawing hand. I recognized the symptoms from back when I was playing MMORPG’s such as City of Heroes/Villains or World of Warcraft obsessively. Fortunately a bit of rest and some ointment are doing wonders, and so we should be back on track making progress towards the print issue and then our new comics.

On my end, I’ve finally finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after a couple months of trying. When I first heard about it I was very enthusiastic on the concept, but in actual experience it just didn’t work out for me.  It’s odd because I absolutely devoured a much larger and longer novel in the Victorian style called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so I can’t say I was turned off by the style. Also, I usually love quirky parodies, but I just felt lukewarm about this one. Maybe it was just the way the whole zombie angle felt like a tacked-on afterthought. Actually, I suppose the whole point was that the zombie angle is a tacked-on afterthought, and so I found myself at an impasse, at times literally having to force myself to keep reading through large passages of boring Jane Austen romance.

I’m in the minority, though. Most folk seem to love the thing. It was #3 on the New York Times Best Seller List, there’s a feature film in the works, and a graphic novel already being previewed. I saw some of the graphic novel, and it might actually be much cooler than the book… mostly on account of getting rid of a lot of the text and focusing on the zombie mayhem. Call me uncultured if you must, but then again anyone truly wishing to be a literati should probably be reading the original Austen novel, anyhow.

Also, there’s one part of P&P&Z that’s a geek flub so blatant I can only hope Seth Grahame-Smith did it intentionally. He decided to make martial arts (or as termed by the upper class of the novel, “the deadly arts”) a fairly significant part of the book, and one particularly memorable scene has the heroine defending the honor of her Chinese style against the Japanese style (and ninjas!) of her hostess. This is very specifically set up as something to determine which of the two martial schools is superior.

The heroine’s choice of weapon to uphold the honor of China against Japan?

A katana.

I mean, you might as well remake a movie called The Karate Kid and set it in China, having the protagonist learn Kung Fu instead. Oh wait, that’s happening.

Indictment of Victorian era ignorance towards the “Orient”? Intentional invocation of nerdrage? Those are my best two interpretations. My nerdrage was duly invoked. But it would have been a trivial issue had the rest of the book managed to keep my interest. As it is, I finished it for completeness’ sake, but in the end I was glad I had borrowed it from a friend rather than purchased it myself.

So there it is, a book with zombies and ninjas in it that left me bored. Go figure. But hey, if you enjoyed it, more power to you! As those Austen Brits might declare, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

This week’s comic marks the end point for the first script of Zombie Ranch that I wrote up back in August-September 2009. Mind you, it’s gone through several revisions and extensions since then, but the core arc has remained the same. Poor Zeke has been doomed since the beginning, and anytime I started to get soft on that fate my artist wife was right there to push me back on track, in her adorably bloodthirsty fashion. My intent was to capture some of the spirit of those classic Twilight Zone episodes or old school sci-fi/horror comics where you get introduced to a world not quite our own, and by the end something twisted has happened in a “makes-ya-think” sort of fashion. Whether or not we succeeded is, of course, in the hands of you readers.

Unlike those episodes and comics, which tended to be self-contained stories, this is not the end. There are many more questions to answer and stories to tell. We will be taking a short break, however, since we feel at this point that we’ve finished our first “issue”. I know, I know, that terminology doesn’t mean all that much in webcomics, but Dawn is very excited about putting together something for actual print publication. And what the heck, I suppose I am, too. We’ve got another convention coming up right here in our backyard in Pasadena, CA and it’ll be nice to be able to have something on the table in addition to just referring folk to the website.

Now don’t worry, we do mean short break. Two or three weeks at most, and we’ll have some content for you all in the meantime, such as a new full-color Suzie image that Dawn has drawn up for the print issue cover. You can actually see a black-and-white preview of that currently if you click on over to vote for us at TopWebComics. Actually, whether or not you’re interested in the image I’ll be a bit shameless here and implore you to give us a vote click. It only takes a few seconds and the higher we are on the list, the more new eyeballs we attract to the comic. I’m not expecting top 10 or even top 50 with how new we are, but we’ve been at least on the first page (top 100) until just a few days ago, and I’d love to get back there. You can vote once per day and it’s entirely kosher and legal to do so. Some of you already do so, which is fantastic! I don’t know what I should refer to you as for your dedication… Ranchites? Rancheros? It’s probably just enough to say thanks.

Speaking of TopWebComics, they have another promotion going for one of their affiliates, much as they did for 7th Son back last November. ‘Tis as follows:

Have you ever wanted to be a radio supervillain? Or rather, did you have an idea for a villain you’d love to actually hear on a radiostyle podcast?  Submit your idea for a radio supervillain and read about where you can get hundreds of hours of free audio drama done by the impression cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, over at topwebcomics.com.

Like I’ve said before, TopWebComics has been great for us in terms of getting new readers looking our way, so I’m always happy to return the favor when they put out a call for help. Who knows, maybe one of you out there will have the supervillain idea that Decoder Ring Theatre has longed for!

So here we are. It’s been one heck of a whirlwind few months for Dawn and myself as we waded into the wide world of webcomics, and we extend our heartfelt thank-yous to everyone out there who has supported us… or heck, has just been a regular reader of the comic. As soon as that print issue is available, we’ll announce it for those interested, including the super duper Special Edition I believe Dawn still has a mind to put together. And soon enough we’ll be back to continuing the story of the Z Ranch crew and their bizarre occupation.

For now though, it’s time to pop open a celebratory brewski. By the time you read this it’ll be my baby niece’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, and a first Zombie Ranch milestone. Cheers, y’all!

So now we see how the Z Ranch plans to deal with the question of what to do with a colleague who’s got “the bite”. It calls to mind one of my favorite exchanges from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw:

Higgins: Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you would sell your daughter for £50?
Doolittle: Not in a general way I wouldn’t….
Pickering: Have you no morals, man?
Doolittle: Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

If you recognize those names, yes, the movie musical My Fair Lady is a watered down version of Shaw’s work. Very, very watered down. A hundred years ago, GBS was reveling in no holds barred, incisive cynicism in ways that make Warren Ellis seem like Bil Keane. It’s telling that My Fair Lady was only able to be made over Shaw’s dead body. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my musical theater (perhaps, as has been suggested to me in the past, entirely too much for a heterosexual male), but I understand why Shaw forbade musical adaptations of his own stuff until such time as he didn’t have to be alive to witness them.

Now before I spend this blog entirely on Shaw, let me haul myself back on my intended track, which was to talk about a couple more movies I saw recently and didn’t get around to discussing last week. First off, there was Valley of Gwangi. Many of you (if not all of you) may not understand the absolute need I had to see this movie as soon as I watched a clip of a cowboy wrestling a Pteranodon. First I had to figure out where the clip was from, and then I had to figure out where to get ahold of the film. Netflix to the rescue (although it now appears to be available in its entirety on Youtube, as well).

Valley of Gwangi lived up to my expectations. They weren’t high expectations; basically, I was good so long as I got to see Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs. There could have been more of this, but then again, I don’t know how much Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs action would have had to happen before I could truthfully say, “no more, I’m good”. The entire movie reminded me of the kind of games I would have come up with when I was eight years old and would throw together whatever random toys and playsets I had to hand, creating messy, wonderful smorgasbords of self-entertainment. Only in this case my toys would have been crafted by stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen. In the final analysis, any day I get to watch a T-Rex getting lassoed is a good day.

The second film I wanted to note is the remake of The Crazies, which I caught a theatrical showing of last Tuesday. Now the original was directed by George Romero, and, shamefully perhaps, I have not seen it. What I saw last week was one of the best serious horror movies I’ve witnessed in awhile, and that’s saying something in an era where most of the better horror flicks, zombie or otherwise, seem to veer onto the humor or camp side of the equation. That might be because we’ve seen all the old tropes played out so much they’ve become jokes, but The Crazies takes those tropes and puts them to work again in a way that becomes truly compelling. It’s not going to open any eyes to new vistas of socio-political thought, but cynical ol’ me cared what the hell was happening to the characters. There are set pieces in it that will awaken all sorts of weird phobias you didn’t even know you had. I won’t spoil it, but there was one sequence involving a car wash I was trying like hell to find ludicrous, and I just couldn’t manage it. It was too awesome. Breck Eisner, the director, is currently slated to helm the Flash Gordon remake in 2012, and I can’t wait to see it. I never thought I’d say that since the 1980 movie was such a paragon of cheeseball quirkiness, but this guy’s damn good behind a camera. He delivered a horror experience I hadn’t felt since The Descent. Maybe even moreso. We’ll see how he does in the future.

One of the most terrifying aspects of the zombie genre to me is the idea of the inescapable doom that awaits once you’re “infected”. No matter how small or insignificant the wound might seem, the clock is ticking, and denial of the situation inevitably just ends up making things worse for everyone.

Mind you, this phenomenon isn’t confined solely to zombie fiction, but it’s something that really speaks “zombie story” to me. This is why I can comfortably consider a movie like 28 Days Later to be a zombie movie, regardless of whether the zombies are fast or slow, alive or dead, etc. etc. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean I don’t consider Night of the Living Dead to be a zombie movie, because that would just be silly. So I’ll delve a bit deeper and say that it’s not just the idea of the infection that makes you “one of them”, it’s that the infection makes you no longer “one of us”. It’s the people you knew and cared for turning on you, with no way to stop it from happening except by killing them in cold blood, or at least doing something very bloody to their corpse.

Now it might be pollyanna of me to declare, but in general I’ll say people don’t like the idea of killing other people or defiling their bodies. Particularly when it’s a loved one. Look at how much time and effort and expense we spend on funerals, trying to make a dead relative look as alive and intact as possible. We have huge controversies to this day about the practice of assisted suicide, even when the patient is fully aware, calm, and consenting. Now imagine trying to muster up the gumption to put a bullet in a friend’s head when they’re begging and pleading for their lives. It’s such a small bite. Can you really be sure they won’t recover? Is amputation an option? What if you’re wrong?

So now, if we come back around to Night of the Living Dead, then we have several elements of the above horrors in place regardless of the fact that infection is irrelevant to creating new zombies. We also have a good example in Ben of someone who adapts to the new situation quickly and practically, but because of that is committing acts we might think were monstrous, or at very least worthy of pause or reflection. His desensitized state by the end of the film might even serve as a foreshadowing of his own fate.

Sure, you could argue he’s shooting zombies, but in one case he most definitely shoots a human being. Where do you draw the line? As a non-zombie example, in John Carpenter’s The Thing, one character shoots another, and later the infamous blood test scene reveals the victim was human, leading another of the team to declare “… that makes you a murderer.”

Matter of fact, it’s much akin to the murky borderlines between self-defense and murder that often occurred in the Old West. Anyhow, we’ll see how the folks of the Z Ranch deal with this situation soon enough. I’ve rambled on so long on this I didn’t even get around to talking about any of the new movies I’ve seen, like Dead Snow.

Dead Snow was referred to me a few months back by a visitor to our (as yet still not so very used) forums, but it only recently popped up for Netflix viewing. After viewing it, I can safely say it’s a lot of fun. Mind, you’d have to try really hard to make a movie involving Nazi zombies unfun, and the filmmakers are obvious fans of flicks like Evil Dead and Brain Dead/Dead Alive (I’m a fan, too… an appropriate quote from the latter provided the title of this blog). There’s a flipside to the whole horror of THE BITE where it’s played for laughs, and Dead Snow indulges in not just one but two instances of it. Anyhow, maybe some might find the film a bit too meta since the characters actually talk about those films and one even wears a Brain Dead t-shirt, but whatever. Nazi zombies! Is there anything in creation as killable without guilt as Nazi zombies? It subverts just about everything I laid out in the beginning about hesitation and morality, because… man, it’s an undead Nazi, of COURSE it’s moral to grind its head into a snowmobile intake.

I saw some other flicks I want to mention, but I’ll hold off until next week. And speaking of holding off, last week I wanted to mention something but didn’t, out of respect for the sheer amount of email he was probably already receiving during a tough time. The creator of Everyday Decay announced that he is putting the comic on permanent hiatus, at least in terms of online updates. We were sad to hear of it, but Dawn and I fully respect his reasons for doing so, and the archives will still be up to inspire and entertain. Also at some point in the future, Derrick may finish the story up offline and get a publication together. If and when that happens, I know I’ll be looking out for it.